Explain to me how anything can be better than an Open Office Spreadsheet!
I merely enter the data and the formulas are already written.
That's the point, the formulae are hardcoded, essentially. Financial software is a database app; a spreadsheet's database function is limited, queries poorly, has no useful reporting features unless you kick major ass at macros, and most of all, doesn't have an easily done transaction scheduling system.
True, you can pull your spreadsheet into a database app like Access (or its open equivalent, whatever), but by the time you bother with that, you'll wish you'd just gone with an already developed app.
Quicken sucks. I dealt with it at work for years!!
Quicken or Quickbooks? QB is a powerful piece of crap. Powerful, because if you know what you are doing, it can do many many things. A piece of crap, because the unsophisticated user, which is 99.9% of the QB market, will just misused those features to get themselves in serious trouble. Like today, I looked at somebody's file; they are a small landscaping co., and somehow they have had 84 journal entries year to date. I did not give them any entries to post for 2008, so I don't even want to know
Quicken is a glorified checkbook, but those ad-hoc reporting and budgeting tools, they are very helpful. Can your spreadsheet autobudget for you? It could, but that's a lot of coding formulae.
Personally, I use Microsoft Money 97. Yes, the 1997 edition. Still works great on XP, 11 years later. I've archived the older years, but I can't imagine that amount of data being manageable in Excel. I mean, I probably have 10,000 transactions, many of them split. It also automatically does bank recs, loan amortizations . . . I can do an amortization table in two minutes in Excel, but I really don't want to use my powers for evil any longer. I'll let the Bill Gates of the'90s do it for me!
